Perspective on management development;

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cA Perspective on (^Management development
Describing a management development service is easier
if we first examine the role of the manager himself. In
simplest terms, the manager, or management collec­tively,
can be thought of as using certain resources to
accomplish objectives or operational goals. Often, of
course, his job also includes setting the objectives and
acquiring the resources.
What are these resources? An especially useful way
to categorize them has been suggested by Jay Forrester
of MIT in his "Industrial Dynamics" approach. He re­gards
the determination of corporate performance as
being contained in several streams of resources. These
are:
•• MEN
-$—$—$—$—$ $ » MONEY
• MATERIALS
* - CAPITAL EQUIPMENT
O 0 O 0 0 0 » ORDERS
• INFORMATION
Management Development devotes itself directly to
only one of these streams, the flow of manpower. But
it is important to recognize that the people in an organi­zation,
through their activities, through the decisions
they make, and through their uses of the information and
other resource streams in the organization, tie together
each of the separate and complex flow processes into
a more or less coordinated goal-seeking entity. Manage­ment
development activities can indirectly influence the
entire corporate structure and its performance by chang­ing
the relationships between individuals and/or func­tional
groups and by modifying the ways in which people
generate and utilize information and make decisions. In
other words, the development activity can be used to
implement functional relationships and to engineer hu­man
behavior to achieve the company's operational
goals.
A TOTAL MANAGEMENT PERSONNEL SERVICE
Management development, however, is only one of
26 THE QUARTERLY